Looking to hire someone - which language for drag & drop GUI

[robphelan]

I was thinking about hiring someone to build a floor plan designer for me. Basically, you would start out with a rectangle, and be able to drop in smaller rectangles/polygons to form sections within the layout.

These sections would need to be resizable and nameable - and probably colorable (is that a word?)

I would need to be able to save each floorplan and each of the object's "coordinates" into some sort of SQL DB so they can be extracted for processing.

What would you recommend as far as a language to develop this in?

EDIT: This is would need to be hosted and modifiable online.

 

[BoberFett]

Language? Based on your description, you're far from deciding on a language.

I would suggest finding an off-the-shelf package that does what you want for a GUI. Not sure what you mean by "processed from a database", but if you really need to do something with the data, use a standard file format that the data can be extracted from. SketchUp can export to a number of different formats such as DWG.

 

[slugg]

I have done this in the past for another client, although their "floor plan" was actually for actual geographical locations. I implemented the whole thing in PHP, JS/JQuery, and Google Maps API and stored all of the object info in a MySQL DB. The app is able to generate reports on the floor plans, email them out to other clients and workers, etc. The objects in the floorplan were resizeable, moveable, rotatable, nameable, and colorable.

I had a major constraint in that I *had* to use Google Maps. If I were doing this again, I'd write the whole thing in AngularJS and plain-old HTML5 Canvas. As for the server-side component, you could go with pretty much anything, but I'm partial to ASP.NET (C# would be the language).

So it boils down to 3 major parts, in my book:
1. The server-side language and technology. My recommendation is C# on ASP.NET (or Mono on Linux)
2. A database. In order of preference, I recommend one of these: MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL
3. A client-side framework. BootStrap + AngularJS are clean, easy to maintain, and will give you that modern look and feel.